I’m Glad I’m Not the Only One Who Hates Intuit, Quicken, and Quickbooks

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A few months ago, I posted a rant here about my hate for everything Quickbooks and Intuit. The problem is, however, that a lot of people use it (so that means I have to use it in many of my investigations) and there aren’t many good alternatives.

Intuit immediately got their PR people on my situation, and in no time flat I had my refund and a free piece of Quickbooks software. It didn’t make me like them any better, however. I knew it was simply an attempt to appease a loudmouthed blogger. (Yes, me.)

Here are some great comments posted on Consumerist about Intuit’s acquisition of Mint.com:

PhilFR: “Ugh. This is a sad day. Mint has made my personal finances infinitely more organized. The only question is which will happen first: will Quicken screw up the product, or start charging for it?”

Blueoysterjoe: “What, Intuit will buy Mint and suddenly have great ideas about how to run a personal finance website? No. Intuit will apply its crappy ideas to Mint and turn Mint into crap.”

calchip: “Long ago and far away, Intuit made a great little product called Quicken that sold for 10 bucks. Then they came out with Quickbooks, which in its original incarnation, sold for maybe 100 bucks and did everything.

More recently, Intuit has turned into a complete and total piece of sh*t company that gives you the privilege of paying $250 for a crappy, bloated, crippled piece of software that nags you every single time you use it to buy more of their overpriced crap, refuses to support a product that’s more than 2 years old, and basically makes a product that is almost unusuable unless you’re willing to pay hundreds of dollars a year for crap that you either don’t need or should have been (and was at one time) included in the basic product.

I wish the management of this company would shrivel up and die and be replaced by people that actually believe in *earning* a customer’s business rather than shoving services fees down their throats.

This can only be a bad, bad sign for mint.com. I wonder how long till they ruin it?”

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16 thoughts on “I’m Glad I’m Not the Only One Who Hates Intuit, Quicken, and Quickbooks”

I deleted my account when I found out about the merger. I don’t really like that Mint was able to sell all of my personal info to the highest bidder. Even if they don’t charge for it I’m not interested in being one of their customers.

I share your dislike for all things Intuit. I cannot imagine the pain of doing forensic accounting in a QuickBooks environment.

It’s really hard to get clients to see that they need to invest in set up and training OR they will end up investing in clean up.

I sent off an quick email when I found out that PayCycle sold out to Intuit. I shared my concerns about Intuit’s horrible customer service and their bent toward poaching clients. I am moving my clients away from PayCycle as soon as I can get my arms around our new payroll software.

Two years ago, I thought I’d try these guys again after problems back in the 90’s. (Yeah, I’m an OLD computer guy.)

I had previously been using Wachovia (Wells Fargo) bill pay. Zero problems, but the idea of integrating with a home budgeting program made me willing.

Well, long story short, Quicken BillPay hosed up 3 payments (out of 7), resulting in late fees etc. Problem was the way the *new* Quicken bill pay was formatting the checks such that my credit union would not honor the checks. Quicken finally admitted the error, but refused my request to cover the late fees. So I cancelled the account. And, stopped using QuickBooks. Forever.

Two years later, I discover they are STILL charging my credit card $8.95 a month! Wow, adding insult to injury! Of course, even though there has been ZERO activity for 2-years, they refuse to rebate their dishonest charges. But, they did offer me 3-months “free service” if I ignore their total lack of business ethics! Nice touch boys.

A little research found this gem on a legal site: “In 2004, Intuit Inc., the makers of the popular financial planning software Quicken, began migrating its Quicken Bill Pay customers from a service run by CheckFree to a new online bill management application made by Metavante. During the conversion process, approximately 27,000 former Bill Pay customers were re-activated without their knowledge or approval and subsequently charged between $9.95 and $12.95 per month.”

After continuous use since the late 1980’s, I have come to the conclusion that the unstated corporate mission of Intuit/Quickbooks/Quicken is to give its customers, in the most contentious manner possible, less for more $$……..

I began with QuickBooks in 1999 when I formed my property/marina management company. I am not an accountant, but have never had problems with business math in my life. Well all that changed with Quickbooks. It is so NOT “Intuit”-ive, UNuser friendly, and illogically designed that I got myself into more hot water than I can describe here. Nomatter what I did — including paying a “QB private consultant” to help me to the tune of $450, QB acted as if possessed by a demon. HUGE amounts of money kept dumping themselves into “Undeposited Funds”….memorized transactions did not memorize, or reverted back to previously changed amounts…..new customers’ balances changed or disappeared at will….you get the drift. But the worst part? It crashed — TWICE. I lost the first quarter of 2004 forever, and try explaining that to the IRS. In 2007 I hired a CPA who said I MUST buy QB2007 because she couldn’t interface with my older program (another annoyance…) so I did. The conversion process lost nearly all of my data — and this was done by a professional, NOT me. In the end, I dumped the entire system and currently track my small business with hard copy and Excel spreadsheets. It’s a damn shame, because I’ve spent thousands on two QB programs, plus professional consultant’s time to undo the BUGS! All the while I thought it was me that just couldn’t “get it”, but now I see what crap QuickBooks is because much smarter people than me don’t get it either.

I have used quicken since 1990 and over the years, keeping track of stock transactions. Quicken’s required upgrades to new versions (or they will not update your stock quotes) caused data to disappear and I wasn’t aware of it until I sold a stock and attempted to produce cost data for preparing my annual income tax. I am being notified that I must upgrade to a new version since my 2 year version will not provide automatic updated from my third party providers.

I purchased Quickbooks 2008, have been using it, but I find that it doesn’t provide the flexibility to be able to bupass certain functions. I am trying to clear up an accounts receivable balance and the system refuses to allow me to credit one customer and debit another through a journal entry. It states ” only one customer allowed” I am an accountant and it appears that the programmer (s) who developed this program don’t have a clue and refuse the user the ability to bypass the error function and force the transaction. I know what I am doing.

I having been a loyal customer of their quicken product and now quickbooks , I am disappointed like others on this blog of their concern to make money by forcing users to pay for updates, is a bad business decision. I will be looking for other alternatives and Intuit will loose a loyal past customer.

Just got off the phone with India to register my update to QB 2010 from 2007. 15 minutes to give them my contact info (which they already have), read off the numbers they wanted, and get my code. This couldn’t be handled online? And, why do I have to register QB, when I’m already registered and it’s not like they don’t have a record of my Intuit online purchase and download.

The only reason for the upgrade is pure blackmail on Intuit’s part. Email and credit card processing will be disabled as of July 2010 per the 20 emails they sent and warning messages in the program. Can they legally disable features in a program I’ve been using for three years? It’s like Microsoft saying “If you don’t upgrade office, Word won’t work anymore. The upgrade costs as much as a fresh off the shelf buy.

The upgrade install on my desktop machine was no piece of cake, because the option to install on local machine with data on the server was not there. Forced to call tech support to fix the problem. That took an hour.

This kind of extortion and aggravation caused by Intuit is exactly why we switched to Quickbooks from Peachtree. They were charging for yearly upgrades in excess of retail price for a new version, with zero tech support included. If you wanted to talk to them about a bug (know’em when I see’em,) they required your credit card number first, before they would even listen to the report, then decide if the charge would be reversed. That broke the camel’s back and made the switch to QB.

Apparently, the entire marketing & revenue enhancement staff from Peachtree is now at Intuit. Looking for new accounting software tomorrow.

YAY!! intuit haters!! I have been stuffed around by them for over 2 months now and its over the simplelist thing! I signed up with them to create a website-paid for a domain name, tools and hosting. then their creater didnt work! didnt come up with any dispays or anything i could use to build a website. so i requested my account to be cancelled and my money refunded. till this day they are still charging me for using their services-which im not-i didnt even get a domain name as a day later they emailed me back saying i couldnt have (which is strange as i got it through another website creator) all their phone numbers are false-saying the numbder is invalid-(as they have about 5 different ph numbers to contact-none of them work) and have created numerous help tickets for them to cancell my account and all i get is automatic responses-and my account still remains active!! what can i do to stop them charging me and for them to cancell my account? i have had enough. even their instructions on their website on how to cancell your account are false (it state you can create a help ticket under “cancell my account” and tick an approval box which will automatically delete your account) however none of this exists! Seriously they claim to be proffesionals in website building when they cant even get their facts straight on their own site!! can anybody help me???

Quickbooks is a nightmare for me. Years ago I was a fairly happy Quicken Home and Business user but had to upgrade when I started a corporation with product inventory over five years ago.

The Quickbooks product has bugs and usability issues. The level 1 support is all in India, and it appears their job is primarily to convince you that your problem does not exist and to get you off the phone as quickly as possible.

Quickbooks is designed for accountants, not for end users. It’s user interface does not take into consideration even the simplest end user tasks. I can give many examples, here are a few.

1)The most important section for this business user is the Customer Center where sales orders and invoices are tracked. As most wholesalers know, the key number for tracking is the PO number that originates with the customer. So… try to list transactions by PO# in the customer center. It can’t be done. Can’t search on PO # either — at least not through version 2009. You have to dig through each transaction to find a specific PO number. Rediculous!

2) Create a Sales Order. If you have established payment terms for the customer (such as Net 30), QB assigns a due date that is 30 days out. So if I create a Sales Order on Nov 3, the due date is automatically filled in as Dec. 3 if the established terms are Net 30. That makes sense if I am creating an invoice. But not a sales order. We have had many customers receive merchandise late because each sales order has to be manually changed to reflect a realistic due date before being exported to our warehouse system. Sometimes we forget and these get exported unchanged to the warehouse system. I have been reporting this for 5 YEARS!!! Nobody ever responds or fixes it. (Note: this is not an issue for EDI PO’s that are imported to QB with a due date.)

3) Every item that leaves our warehouse goes through Quickbooks. But the inventory in QB never matches what is reported by our warehouse which shows the correct amount. And I mean by A LOT. We only have five products, no builds, but I cannot trust QB for inventory levels at all. I have no idea why.

4) The last version I upgraded to, 2009 hit me with advertising for every task I performed. It was unbelieveable!! Turning these ads and nag screens off was not intuitive. I had to research it and then resort to several tips and tricks to put an end to nag screens and ads — for a product that cost me over $300!!! Not one of the services being advertised was even relevant to me. It was just plain intrusive and RUDE.

5) The version of QB that I use (Premeire for manufacturing and wholesale)has no online version which would at least do away with having to install, upgrade and back up on my own computer. Of course, after the two day outtage that Quickbooks Online suffered recently, I can’t see how anywould could trust using the Online service.

6) I have upgraded from 2005, 2006, 2008 and finally to 2009 always hoping to see some improvement in the programs usability. But the product remains largely the same except for all the PAID add-on services that they advertise. In effect, I have gotten NOTHING for all the upgrades.

Finally, I have to say that Quickbooks is basically a bare bones back end accounting system for accountants. It is no way to run a business. What is needed is a cost effective ERP type system that sits on top of Quickbooks, maybe with a database in between operating in parallel. I have been looking for such a product, but nothing has really jumped out at me. It appears that small businesses are stuck with this crappy solution and support.

Intuit is the embodiment of all that is evil in business. It is a malignant cancer to capitalism.

QB needs to be upgraded every minute. But wait, their POS that links to QB never does what it should and costs a fortune too! (For those curious, POS is supposed to stand for Point of Sale – but not in Intuit’s case).

Then Intuit bought out my Merchant Bank account. Recently, to continue processing cards with the POS, it required a $900 upgrade. But that wasn’t enough. Intuit sent out a letter telling all the customers that Intuit did not make enough money, so this year we need to make a one time $50 payment. I AM NOT KIDDING!

Oh but it gets better. Intuit, the ever expanding source of evil, bought Homestead. So now my web hosting costs MORE and I cannot use the email lists for a newsletter to my customers unless we pay another $500/year for another shitty intuit service…

Three days ago I discovered that Intuit upgraded their servers and they made a mistake. We will not be able to update my website for some indefinate period of time. It is not like it matters, businesses and ecommerce are not important, right? Well, not in their eyes.

Small businesses really need to come together and kill the Intuit monster. Every time I find an alternative, Intuit buys them out!

Plain and simply is a piece of shit company. There only concern in writting software is to make sure they get paid no matter what you do.

For this reason the program works like shit.

From my experience as soon as Intuit buys a program it immediately get user unfreindly and from that point on you have to through a maze of garbage to get something resolved because above all intuit needs to get paid first in order to answere the questions you have to run the garbage.

Would someone please set up some kind of political forum where we could inform our representatives that Intuit has for all intense and purposes taken over the small business accounting software market.

Because of this they impose rediculous garbage upon us. Something needs to be done!!!

They need to be stopped!!!!

I hope someone out there has some political savy in order to try and bring about some hearings on this. This garbage needs to stop. Some competition needs to take place.